In Paris, May 1968, students held massive occupations at some of France’s most prestigious university campuses. When riot police crushed the first of these protests, popular support grew and within days more than a million marched through the streets of the city. Workers started independently occupying factories, beginning one of the only general strikes to ever fully paralyze an industrialized, first-world nation. This was a wildcat strike, led autonomously and directly by workers, rather than any union bureaucracy.(more…)

In Greece, they throw molotovs in the street. For every reason under the sun: in defense of their friends, to burn down the state, for old time’s sake, for the hell of it, to mark the death of a kid the cops killed for no reason. For no reason. They light Christmas trees on fire. December is the new May. They smash windows, they turn up paving stones, they fight the cops because their future went missing, along with the economy, a few years ago. They occupy buildings to find one another, to be together in the same place, to have a base from which to carry out raids, to drink and fuck, to talk philosophy. The cops smash into packs of their friends on motorbikes. They hold down the heads of their friends on the pavement and kick them in the face.

The Occupation Cookbook is a “manual” that describes the organization of the student occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences that took place in the spring of 2009 and lasted for 35 days. It was written for two reasons: to record what happened, and to present the particular organization of this action in such a way that it may be of use to other activists and members of various collectives if they decide to undertake a similar action.

The Cookbook is currently being translated into several languages. At the moment, all but the final few chapters have been translated into English, and the Introduction has been translated into Spanish. For a full page version of the English translation follow this link, or simply click on the link to any of the chapters listed below. {Order print copies of the English version from AK Press.}